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This chapter focuses on China's Fortress Banking System. In China, the banks are the financial system; nearly all financial risk is concentrated on their balance sheets. The heart of China's financial system includes just four banks: Bank of China (BOC), China Construction Bank (CCB), Agricultural Bank of China (ABC), and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). In China, capital begins and ends with the Big 4 banks and Bank of Communications. The banking system has thousands of entities if the 12 second‐tier banks, the urban and rural banks, Postal Savings Bank, and credit cooperatives, are included. In 1977, China was bankrupt; its commercial and political institutions were in tatters. There was no real national economy, only a collection of local fiefdoms held together by a broken Party organization. The chapter discusses the strategy used to pull it all back together. It also provides a straightforward comparison between U.S. and Chinese banks that is based on their total assets.

General Carr, at my request, kindly granted me one month’s leave of absence to visit my family in St. Louis, and ordered Captain Hayes, our quartermaster, to let me ride my mule and horse to Sheridan, distant 140 miles, where I was to take the cars.¹ I was instructed to leave the animals in the quartermaster’s corral at Fort Wallace until I should come back, but instead of doing this I put them both in the care of my old friend Perry, the hotel-keeper at Sheridan. After a twenty days absence in St. Louis, pleasantly spent with my family, I

The “free soil of the western prairies” meant Iowa. Trumbull, Christiana, and Matthew Jr. were one of many families who crossed the Mississippi River by ferryboat and found themselves in “the beautiful land.” Iowa was a young state, admitted to the Union in 1846, a pioneer state where an ambitious man could make his mark. By the terms of the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Iowa was a state that was off limits to slavery. Railroads had not yet made their way to Iowa so Trumbull could not get work at his wheelbarrow trade. However, he managed to get a job

Towards the end of February, the winter, which had been so mild and beneficent, lashed out in a sudden violent fury. The roads and railways were blocked with huge drifts of snow, and for a week, early in March, no mails whatever reached Macdonald’s office in the East Block.¹ He lived in a curious state of isolation and helpless inactivity which was like a physical expression of the miserable suspense of the past few weeks. For a time it seemed that there were no foreseeable happy endings ahead. The reports of Howe’s progress in his by-election contest in Nova Scotia